Comcast and OpenStack: Engineering from Cloud to Couch

By Mark Muehl
|
May 19, 2015

What do you talk about when you’re sitting on the couch, watching TV with 6,000 of your closest friends?

For my colleagues Andrew Mitry, Shilla Saebi, and me, the choice was obvious, since our couch was onstage at the 2015 OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, Canada and our 6,000 friends were OpenStack users and developers from around the world.

We were proud to update the community on how we’re using the world’s preeminent open source cloud platform to quickly and efficiently deliver content and services to millions of Comcast customers.

Back in 2012, we made the decision to build our Comcast Elastic Cloud on OpenStack, and almost every day we find new reasons to feel good about our decision. OpenStack has proven to be powerful, flexible and scalable, and has only gotten better thanks to the continuing contributions of a vibrant, engaged global development community.

At Comcast, we use OpenStack for a wide range of purposes, from developing new apps, services and products, such as the recently launched Xfinity Share app, to operating millions of our customers’ cloud-enabled X1 set-top boxes.

Using the Comcast Elastic Cloud, powered by OpenStack, our development teams across the country can create, deploy and scale new apps for X1 in a matter of weeks, rather than months.

During our keynote chat with Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, Andrew shared that more than 1,500 Comcast engineers are working on more than 600 distinct projects on our OpenStack platform, and those numbers are only going up. We’ve dramatically scaled up our OpenStack infrastructure to meet the growing demand, and it’s now an indispensable tool for the hundreds of engineers making cool stuff at Comcast.

Of course, the best part about open source software isn’t just using it, but also collaborating with our colleagues around the world to make it better. Before settling into our rolling living room for the keynote, Shilla checked the latest numbers and we are proud to say that we’ve contributed more than 37,000 lines of code to OpenStack since we started using the platform.

OpenStack is just one of dozens of open source projects we participate in at Comcast as users, contributors and creators. On our GitHub page you can check out some of our latest contributions.

With the day one keynotes over, the real work of the OpenStack Summit begins as engineers roll up their sleeves and set to work making a great product better, and ensuring that OpenStack continues to evolve to meet the demands of a dynamic, growing user base.

There’s a lot to do. Our team will be focusing specifically this week on:

Evolving OpenStack’s codebase to meet the hyper-scale demands of the next generation of applications.

Identifying new ways to enhance the productivity of engineers developing new products and services on our OpenStack cloud.

Helping to develop the roadmap for how OpenStack enables network functions virtualization (NFV).

We’ll be here all week doing our best to keep up with a conference that has tripled in size since we first attended three years ago. Check out #OpenStack on Twitter to keep up with the latest and visit the OpenStack Foundation's YouTube page to see what’s happening in the meeting rooms.